Why You Shouldn’t Source Your Own SDR Candidates

The operative word here is shouldn’t, as in should not. That’s right, we’re telling you that you shouldn’t waste your time hunting down SDR candidates.

Why you might ask? In short, it’s a big waste of time and money.

We interviewed 40 SaaS sales managers over the last few months about their sales development teams. We’ve learned about, and chronicled their hiring best practices, their favorite software platforms, and their opinions on what makes a high performace SDR.

Today, in part 4 of our research study, we’re making the argument against sourcing your own SDRs

Again, the next logical thought is: “So…if I’m not sourcing my own SDR candidates, how would we find them? Recruiters? Word of mouth? Smoke signals?”

We’ll get to how you should find candidates, I promise, but let’s first look at how much time is actually spent sourcing your own SDR candidates…

How many interviews does it take to hire an SDR?

For some context, our interviewees have a yearly SDR hiring quota ranging from 1 to 36 new hires. The average sales manager in our study hires 5 SDRs over the course of a year.

Here’s the real surprise…

For each SDR hire, our sales managers averaged almost 13 phone screens (we calculated 12.75 phone screens, so we rounded up). This means that for a team of 5 SDRs, the average sales manager is interviewing 65 candidates. This is not including second interviews and final interviews.

This is not to say that we didnt have some extremely efficient hiring machines. A few of our interviewees only screen 3 or 4 candidates before narrowing it down to the final hire. We even had one company that interviews only 2 candidates before making a final decision.

On the other hand, we had another compay that chooses to do ~50 phone screens before beginning to narrow down the candidates.

How much time does all of this take?

Knowing that the average company interviews at least 13 people before moving on in the process, we wanted to know how much time it took to hire one person. In other words, we asked sales managers to tell us the exact amount of hours spent on hiring one candidate.

This was a hard question and required some thinking and calculation. But our sales manager-interviewees are masterful thinkers and gave us some great results:

The average amount of time spent on hiring activities per candidate was 18 hours. That includes searching for candidates, interviewing them, and hiring them.

Again we had some hiring efficiency machines quote me at 3 hours per candidate, but we had others saying that 25 hours per candidate was an accurate number. The range was pretty astonishing.

The alternative to courcing your own candidates

From what we’ve seen, it takes a lot of effort to find a good SDR. With an average of ~13 interviews before hiring someone and 18 hours of work spent sourcing, interviewing, and hiring…there has to be a better way.

Sure, you could go to a traditional recruiter for candidates, but you’ll likely still spend a bunch of time interviewing people that are not the right fit. As someone who has recruited before, recruiters eventually get the right profile, but it takes some time.

There are a number of training programs out there specifically designed to train and prepare SDRs for working in SaaS sales.

For example, preHIRED interviews and screens it’s candidates before they even get into the training program. Once someone is approved, they go through one of the top sales training programs available and receive instruction on what to expect in their first SDR job.

Why waste your time sourcing and interviewing candidates that may or may not have the right skills, personality type, and drive for the job? As a sales manager, If companies like preHIRED are already sourcing and training SDR candidates, why not tap into that pool of talent?

If the goal is to spend more time coaching your team and less time worrying about hiring, it might make sense to work with a company that worries about the sourcing and training for you.

If you’re interested in learning more, contact us at preHIRED. We’ve got pre-screened and fully trained SDRs eager to start their careers in software sales